The Supreme Court declined this month to overturn a North Dakota law that requires voters to present an ID listing their residential address at the polls. The decision could have a negative impact on tens of thousands of rural voters — many of them Native Americans who live on one of the states five reservations, where residents are not required to have a street address. Native Americans have long faced unique challenges relating to voter suppression. They were the last to gain suffrage in 1924 and couldn’t vote in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Utah until 1948.
“If Native people are constantly being turned away at the polls and having this many problems, it actually [discourages] people from voting further,” Danielle Ta’sheena Finn, external affairs director for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (@StandingRockST) and a citizen of the tribe, tells Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson. “My grandma has been turned away at the polls with her passport in 2014, and she felt like, ‘Why is it worth going back?’ “
Full Article: North Dakota Voter ID Law Could Keep Rural Native Americans From Voting | Here & Now.